Best Practices for Automated Security Testing with Cypress

Security testing is an important part of the software automation testing life cycle and evaluates the security of the software by checking for vulnerabilities. Security testing also measures the system’s durability by evaluating how the application responds to uncertain threads. Different types of security testing can be automated using automation testing frameworks such as Cypress.

In this blog, let us understand how the Cypress framework automates the entire security testing process and the best practices to do that in real-time implementation.

Cypress Overview

Cypress is an open-source automation testing tool for JavaScript and Typescript-based web applications. Cypress is a famous and easy-to-use tool for testing front-end and application programming interface (API) automation.

Cypress Cloud provides a cloud testing platform to perform automation testing processes in a continuous integration pipeline.

Cypress framework has a pre-build folder structure. The main folder of Cypress contains five types of subfolders such as:

• Integration: The integration folder consists of test scripts that can be automated during the implementation.
• Fixed: If you are using the external test data for the test cases, you can store them in the fixed folder.
• Plugins: The Plugins folders contain special features that can be used in the web application testing. The plugins allow you to implement multiple plugins in the project by configuring them according to your needs. This plugin folder also contains the index.js file as default. 
• Support: In the support folder, you can store repetitive commands, and code can be used whenever needed. This folder also comes with both index.js and customize.js files; additional files can be added based on your needs.
• Assets: Images, screenshots, and multimedia assets like gifs and videos are also stored in the asset file.

Requirements to Perform Security Testing With Cypress

To perform security testing with Cypress framework, you must understand the following steps:

• It is important to understand the web application’s functionalities and potential vulnerabilities to perform security testing with the Cypress framework. This includes understanding the attacks that approach the web application, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery.
• Creating a test plan that includes all test cases that must be checked for security vulnerabilities. The test plan should consist of both positive and negative test scenarios, and the test plan to check the unexpected threads.
• Cypress frameworks allow developers and testers to write automated test cases that can mimic human behavior and interact with web elements. These automated test cases check sensitive data encryption, user input sanitization, decryption, and proper handling of sessions and cookies.

Best Practices to Perform Automated Security Testing with Cypress

Automation security testing with the Cypress framework involves the identification of weaknesses in the application and preventing web applications from having unexpected security threads. Here are some of the best methods to perform the automated security testing

Understanding the OWASP

The OWASP(Open Worldwide Application Security Project) Top 10 is an awareness document for web application security. The OWASP contains the top 10 most crucial security risks to web applications. This document is regularly updated to raise awareness of the newly discovered security issues among developers and QA testers. The OWASP top ten includes

1. Broken Access Control
2. Injection
3. Insecure Design
4. Security Misconfiguration
5. Cryptographic Failures
6. Identification and Authentication Failures
7. Security Logging and Monitoring Failure
8. Server-Side Request Forgery
9. Vulnerable and Outdated Components
10.  Software and Data Integrity Failures

Familiarizing yourself with these OWASP top 10 security risks will help prioritize the automation testing efforts on the most common vulnerabilities in web application development. 

Integrating CI/CD Pipeline

Integrating and running the web application in Continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines are the same as running the web application on the local machine. It is one of the essential and powerful use cases of automation testing that can improve the web application’s security. Whenever a change is made in the code base, the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) pipelines automatically execute the test cases and ensure the web application works steadily after implementation.

You can embed security automation testing in the CI/CD pipelines with the help of CI providers like CircleCI, Gitlab CI, GitHub Actions, and so on. This ensures that security check is part of your web application development lifecycle. Cypress cloud platform increases the visibility in the CI pipeline. It performs automation testing to check for security risks from the early to the web application’s deployment stage.

Cypress also integrates well with cloud testing platforms like LambdaTest to scale up the automated testing process. LambdaTest is an AI-powered test execution and orchestration platform that empowers developers and testers to perform automation testing seamlessly on over 3000+ real browsers and operating system combinations.

Cypress Security Plugin

The Plugins allow us to extend or modify the internal behavior of the Cypress framework. Cypress framework allows its users to perform automation testing and execute all the test cases in web browsers like Google, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, etc. Cypress plugins enable web applications to run outside the web browser. This allows the Cypress plugins to check for security vulnerabilities inside and outside the browser.

Integrated with such plugins that help in security testing tasks like vulnerability scanning and automation scanning to check security issues. Such Cypress plugins will help improve the web application’s security outside the web browser.

Integration With OWASP ZAP

OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) is a free, open-source tool that can be integrated with Cypress frameworks. OWASP ZAP scans the web applications’ components, functions, and modules to find vulnerabilities. Its penetrating testing tool helps the developer and QA testers find the security risks in web applications. ZAPs have two types of scans: active scan and passive scan. The ZAP’s passive scan automatically records the requests and responses of the web applications and creates an alert whenever a vulnerability is found.

ZAP’s active scans actively modify or extend the recorded requests and responses to further detect the vulnerability. 

Implement Authentication and Authorization Tests

Authentication and authorization testing are crucial components of the software automation testing life cycle. This ensures the user’s access to the application resources. Authentication testing involves identifying and verifying users based on usernames and passwords. If the user is found illegible, access will not be provided to secure the web resources. Authorization testing determines what the user can access after being authenticated.

Cypress automation testing framework can generate multiple user logins to check the authentication and authorization of the web applications to ensure the application is resistant to unauthenticated access and potential security threats. 

Implementing Snyk Scans

Snyk (So Now You Know) is a cloud-based security tool that scans the entire code base of the web application and fixes the vulnerabilities in the code, containers, and infrastructures. Snyk scan allows the application user to automate the scanning process to monitor the changes in the code and ensure the modified code has no security vulnerabilities. Synk advisors provide inline actionable advice to fix weaknesses in the code.

Cypress framework can integrate the Synk scans in the web application to ensure the web application is resistant to security vulnerabilities and potential risks. The Synk analysis will provide detailed information on weaknesses in the code base and advice to prevent the vulnerabilities.

Scan for Common Vulnerabilities

Use the Cypress tools or plugins that perform automation scanning on common vulnerabilities like injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and security misconfigurations. The common vulnerability scanning in web applications can be done using the 5 steps method. 

Step 1: The first step is to establish the vulnerability management strategy to fill the requirements of the vulnerability scans, including the right person, implementing the right process, and researching the techniques and technologies that will be used.

Step 2: Choose the right vulnerability management tool in the Cypress tool and automate the entire process.

Step 3: Extending the application of the Cypress vulnerability scanning tools by identifying rouge devices, Scans the application infrastructure, and reviewing the functions of the code.

Step 4: Continuously Scan the web application to ensure its safety and performance. 

Step 5: Identifying and Fixing: Once the Cypress tool finds a vulnerability, categorize it based on its impact on the security risk and prioritize the fixing process.

 Data Handling and Protection

Ensure that your web application safely handles and stores the data and resources. Cypress automation testing framework handles the sensible data such as passwords and login credentials by using the encrypting and decrypting mechanism, which will ensure the safety of passwords from unauthorized access. Cypress framework keeps the sensible data safe through regular backups and software updates.

You can securely store and handle data using these three strategies with Cypress automation testing framework.

• Data Security:  This protects the data from accidental loss and security threads.
• Data Availability: Active backup of the secured data often to restore the data after the security attacks.
• Data Access Control: Check whether the data is accessible only to authorized users to avoid security breaches.

API Security Testing

 If the web application is using an API, it is important to check the security of the API.  So, you have to extend your test coverage to API testing. Multiple tools are available to check the vulnerabilities in API and Cypress frameworks, allowing the developers and testers to integrate such tools in the security testing to confirm the durability of the APIs.

The API security tools check the authentication, authorization, input validation, and protection against common API vulnerabilities. These tools also allow monitoring of the API interaction between the web application’s front and back ends to respond to security incidents during the interactions.

Conclusion

In Conclusion, Cypress is a powerful and versatile tool that can be used for automated security testing. Cypress framework’s flexibility in integrating and implementing third-party tools and plugins and its ability to generate user interaction with the web application front-end makes it an excellent choice for developers and testers to enhance the application’s security by automating the entire testing process. By following these practices during automation testing with Cypress framework, your web application will be safe and secure in real-time from unauthorized and unexpected security risks.